


Tony Stark Has a Heart

by Musiclover712



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers - Freeform, Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Spoilers, Captain America: Civil War minor spoilers, Gen, Iron Man 1, Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, Sokovia, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 10:27:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4621851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Musiclover712/pseuds/Musiclover712
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An Analyzation of Tony Stark’s biggest fear and how his actions are reflected from it throughout Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Avengers, Iron Man 3, Avengers 2, and even Captain America: Civil War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tony Stark Has a Heart

So I was watching this scene from  _ **Iron Man 2**_  earlier, and I found that the exchange between Tony and Rhodey really illustrates what Tony struggles with the most: not wanting others to get hurt because of him.

The Scene starts out with Rhodey telling Tony that he needs to get ahead of the current problem they were facing, which is the military wanting to take Tony’s suits, and the fact that somebody was able to replicate Tony’s technology even though Tony was sure that it would take years before that happened. However, Rhodey realizes that Tony isn’t alright and helps him to his desk to replace his chip in his arc-reactor. Tony notices that Rhodey keeps looking at him and asks, “What are you looking at?”

Rhodey replies with, “I’m looking at you,” and then he goes on to say, “You want to do this whole alone, gunslinger act, and it’s unnecessary. You don’t have to do this alone.”

Tony replies with, “You know, I wish I could believe that, I really do. But you’ve go to trust me. Contrary to popular belief, I know exactly what I’m doing.”

Tony thinks he has to do everything by himself, and many people might interpret this problem as Stark having an ego and wanting all of the glorification and recognition that comes with being a superhero for himself, like Steve Rogers believed to be the truth and bluntly told him in the famous exchange between them in _ **Avengers**_ :

_****Steve Rogers**** **:** Big man in a suit of armor. Take that off, what are you? _

****Tony Stark**** **:** Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist. 

**Steve Rogers** : I know guys with none of that worth ten of you. I’ve seen the footage. The only thing you really fight for is yourself. You’re not the guy to make the sacrifice play, to lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you. 

_**Tony Stark** : I think I would just cut the wire._

_**Steve Rogers** : Always a way out… You know, you may not be a threat, but you better stop pretending to be a hero._

_**Tony Stark** : A hero? Like you? You’re a lab rat, Rogers. Everything special about you came out of a bottle!_

_**Steve Rogers** : Put on the suit. Let’s go a few rounds._

Even though there might be some truth to what Steve says , there is a bigger reason why Tony Stark wants to do the gun - slinger act alone and not be a team player: he doesn’t want people to get hurt due to his actions because for so many years, he built weapons and sold them to multiple parties and without knowing it, many innocent people where getting hurt/killed because of his weapons, such as Wanda and Pietro Maximoff’s parents and the soldiers that were with him, while he was in Afghanistan. In fact, he even got hurt because of one of his weapons.

However, after his time in captivity in  _ **Iron Man**_ , his eyes were opened about the damage that his weapons have caused to thousands of people and made the decision to eliminate the weapons manufacturing branch of his company. This illustrates his beginnings of trying to make up for all the lives that his weapons took, and why he needed to become Ironman. After all Dr. Yensen, who died saving Stark, told Stark not to waist his life. Stark took that to heart by becoming Ironman and trying to redeem himself for all the lives lost because of him. This is why he thinks he has to do everything alone because he refuses to allow another person to get hurt because of him, especially the people he cares about most: Rhodey, Pepper, and Happy. 

 

However, Tonyeventually realizes that towards the end of  **Iron Man 2,** he can’t always deal with nor fix things by himself - sometimes he needs somebody to help him. So he allows Rhodey to become his partner in fighting Whiplash’s drones to save the people at the Stark Expo and Pepper. This in my opinion is a defining moment for Stark because it illustrates that he is finally allowing somebody to help him and that he is starting to let go of his fear of getting someone hurt and trusting himself.

Despite that he finally does allow Rhodey to help him save the day in  **Iron Man 2,** he still doesn’t act like a team player in  **Avengers** at first **.** He tries to act like a narcissistic, sarcastic jerk towards the entire team to hide his insecurities,  and as a way to keep the team at a distance. For instance, when Thor takes Loki away from them, Steve tries to tell Stark that they need a plan of attack; however, Stark refuses to work with Steve and tells him that he has a plan - ATTACK! Throughout most of the movie, he tries to push everybody’s buttons, especially Steve’s. In my opinion, Stark might have been jealous of Steve because Steve doesn’t seem to have the fear that his actions could hurt others and that Steve seems to be confident enough in himself as a hero. Unlike Stark, who still has insecurities about whether he is good enough and whether he can save everyone; although, he hides it behind his snark.  Yet, later in the movie, he finally realizes that maybe this team thing isn’t so bad, especially when there is a hostile alien army coming through a hole in the sky trying to attack Manhattan. Yeah, he defiantly can’t deal with that alone. So when the team finally comes together, he allows himself to finally become apart of something greater and put his fears and insecurities aside to help the team get the job done. He even proves that he is a team player by making the sacrifice play of taking the nuke into the worm hole, which saves New York and kills all of the aliens at once. I guess Steve was wrong about Stark not being the guy to make the sacrifice play. By the end of Avengers, Stark seems to finally realize what it means to be a hero, and it seems like maybe he has finally let go of his fear. But looks can be deceiving.  

 

  


In  ** _Iron Man 3_** _,_ we realize that instead of his fear going away, it had intensified to the point that Stark was suffering from PTSD: having night terrors and panic attacks every time somebody mentioned New York, wormhole, or aliens. In the beginning of the movie, we find out that Stark hadn’t slept in over 72 hours because he suffered from nightmares and night terrors of the Battle of New York and him having to take the nuke into the worm hole. We find out that Stark has become even more scared of threats hurting the people he loves, due to the fact that treats are becoming more numerous and more powerful. He starts thinking what can he do? After all, he is just a man in a can. We see that the Battle of New York had truly effected him on an emotional level and that his near death experience traumatized him to the point that every time he fell asleep he saw himself falling out the wormhole to the ground below.  However, he finally does admit this to Pepper, which illustrates that he finally willing to trust other people to help deal with his problems.

Throughout the rest the movie, we see Stark struggle with having to deal with giant load of stuff: the Mandarin (the latest threat), protect his love ones, and battling with the idea of can he be ironman without the suit? He especially has to answer the last question when he finds himself without his ironman suit because it wasn’t charging fast enough, while having to face the Mandarin. However, in my opinion, I think it was beneficial for Stark to go through this experience because it made him have to think outside of the box and go out of his comfort zone: not having protective armor to protect himself. Besides, he can’t always rely on his ironman suits in battle. He has to be prepared to be able to improvise if his suits quit working during battle or if he is facing a villain that could mess with or effect his suits. 

Yet, during the final battle, we find out how he had been coping with his PTSD: he built over 30 ironman suits in approximately six months. Now thats defiantly excessive. I think he felt that by building more and more ironman suits, he would feel more secure and be able to protect his love ones better. During the final battle, however, he learns that sometimes even with his suits he can’t protect everyone: Pepper almost dies because Tony wasn’t able to catch her in time when she falls 300 + feet down to the ground. Thankfully she did survive, and Stark learned a very valuable lesson that led him to realizing that the suits were a cocoon and a security blanket. Realizing this, he then has Jarvis blow up his suits, symbolizing that he is finally letting go of his greatest fear and that he can be ironman and still protect people without his suits. He also gets his arc reactor removed as well, closing that chapter of his life.   

 

  


After he learns this valuable lesson in _ **Ironman 3** , _we as viewers finally think that maybe Stark just might have finally gotten over his fear. However, that is not the case as proven in  ** _Avengers 2_. ** In the beginningof the movie, we find out that Stark has built more Ironman suits (What is going on Whedon, this makes no since?). Many viewers really felt that since Tony blew up his suits and had his arc reactor removed that he was retired from being Ironman. However, can we really believe that Tony could ever stop being Ironman, I mean really? Clearly, we find out that he can’t. So anyway, getting back to the point. We find that Stark seems to be coping with his PTSD really well; however, when he steps into the secret room in Strucker’s Hydra lab in Sokovia and sees Chitauri alien corpses from the battle New York, it brings his biggest fear back up front and center. When Wanda Maximoff steps into the room, she can sense Stark’s fear and uses it to her own advantage: forcing him to have a nightmare in which he sees all of his friends dying in a battle field and Steve asking him why he didn’t do enough and why he didn’t save them?

This motivates Stark to use Loki’s scepter (which he knew very little about)  to help create his “peace keeping program” or as he puts it “a suit of armor around the world.” However, he finds that his so called peace keeping program has a different idea of peace than what he intended: forcing humans to evolve by causing extinction events, but later decides that eliminating humanity as a hole and creating the new race is the only path to peace. This leads to some major consequences, including his teams trust of him. They don’t see why he had build this thing to protect the world, even when Stark tries to explain that even though they can bust arm dealers all the the live long day, whats beyond Earth is the end game, and that they can’t win when dealing with those threats. As the Avengers begin to have to face this new threat, Ultron, the Avengers start to realize that Ultron could actually be unstoppable, which scares Tony the most, even though he won’t admit it. Tony starts to realize that Ultron could be the end of the Avengers and the end of the path he started them on (three years ago, when the team was established). After all, Ultron did say we create the things we dread.

However, when Stark finds away to possibly fix everything, by ironically creating another AI (which is ridiculous when you think about it because isn’t that where it went wrong the last time, and the fact that Ultron is AI himself, so how did Tony actually know, even though Jarvis isn’t evil, that this time around it wouldn’t be a murderbot?), he goes for it anyway because after all Stark will always try to make things right. However, like Wanda says both Stark and Ultron don’t know the difference between saving the world and destroying it. Which goes to show that Stark never thinks things through or considers the consequences of his actions before he leaps forward. Thankfully the Vision was not a murderbot, but actually the key in destroying Ultron, so Tony was lucky this time. However, the final battle wasn’t without consequences, an entire city was destroyed to save billions of people, thousands of people became homeless, hundreds to thousands of people actually died, and even one of their own, Pietro Maximoff, did not make it. 

 

This goes to show how much Tony Stark’s fear continues to control his life because it led him to creating the biggest threat the world had ever seen and almost led to the end of the world. Had Tony Stark had better control over his fear, he would have realized that the dream of his was just a dream, not his legacy, and that using alien technology that he knew absolutely nothing about was a stupid idea. Because of his actions, the world will continue to face the consequences for years to come. It also leads to the next big conflict, which literally tears the team apart: Superhero registration act. 

In  _ **Captain America: Civil War** , _Tony Stark’s fear will still be controlling Stark’s actions. Because of his involvement in building Ultron, Stark most likely feels extreme guilt for everything that Ultron did and feels that if he has the ability to build something like Ultron, than imagine what other superheroes can do without restrictions? So Tony Stark actually for once sides with the government in agreeing that superheroes need to be given boundaries because without them, they are just as bad as the villains. He feels that this necessary because he feels that superheroes, without restrictions, could cause more harm than good and that this is the only way to protect everyone. However, according  Steve it’s impossible to save everyone: “In this job, you try to save everybody you can. Sometimes that doesn’t mean everybody.” Yet, Stark can’t accept that. He believes that there is way to prevent bad things from happening and that their is way to protect everybody. He also tends to think that he can fix all of the worlds problems because he is a mechanic. He fixes things for a living, after all. However, like I said earlier Tony never looks ahead and sees the consequences that his actions can cause, and in this case, it will tear the Avengers apart, tear his fragile, barely there friendship with Captain America,   destroy lives, and even possibly allow a villain or two to execute their evil plan beneath them. This will probably change the face of the Marvel Cinematic Universe forever. However, that is based on speculation.  

Even though Tony Stark has many flaws and lets his fear of others getting hurt because of his actions and his fear having the inability of protecting everyone control his own actions, Tony Stark isn’t a bad guy. He is guy who is just trying to redeem himself and become a better man. He just wants to SAVE EVERYONE!!!!!! He is a hero despite all of his mistakes. Pepper was right, Tony Stark does have a heart. 


End file.
